RbVmomi

This is a community-supported, open source project at VMware. It is built and
maintained by programmers like you!

Introduction

RbVmomi is a Ruby interface to the vSphere API. Like the Perl and Java SDKs,
you can use it to manage ESX and vCenter servers. The current release
supports the vSphere 6.5 API. RbVmomi specific documentation is
online and is meant to
be used alongside the official documentation.

Installation

geminstallrbvmomi

Support for older Ruby versions

RbVmomi supports Ruby 1.8.7 and higher, but certain dependencies may need
pinning to older versions to get a compatible set of gems.

On Ruby 1.8.7:

use nokogiri 1.5.x (Gemfile: gem 'nokogiri', '< 1.6')

On both Ruby 1.9 and 1.8.7:

use json 1.x (Gemfile: gem 'json', '< 2')

Usage

A simple example of turning on a VM:

require'rbvmomi'vim=RbVmomi::VIM.connect(host:'foo',user:'bar',password:'baz')dc=vim.serviceInstance.find_datacenter('my_datacenter')||fail('datacenter not found')vm=dc.find_vm('my_vm')||fail('VM not found')vm.PowerOnVM_Task.wait_for_completion

This code uses several RbVmomi extensions to the vSphere API for concision.
The expanded snippet below uses only standard API calls and should be familiar
to users of the Java SDK:

require'rbvmomi'vim=RbVmomi::VIM.connect(host:'foo',user:'bar',password:'baz')root_folder=vim.serviceInstance.content.rootFolderdc=root_folder.childEntity.grep(RbVmomi::VIM::Datacenter).find{|x|x.name=='mydatacenter'}||fail('datacenter not found')vm=dc.vmFolder.childEntity.grep(RbVmomi::VIM::VirtualMachine).find{|x|x.name=='my_vm'}||fail('VM not found')task=vm.PowerOnVM_Taskfilter=vim.propertyCollector.CreateFilter(spec:{propSet:[{type:'Task',all:false,pathSet:['info.state']}],objectSet:[{obj:task}]},partialUpdates:false)ver=''loopdoresult=vim.propertyCollector.WaitForUpdates(version:ver)ver=result.versionbreakif['success','error'].member?(task.info.state)endfilter.DestroyPropertyFilterraise(task.info.error)iftask.info.state=='error'

As you can see, the extensions RbVmomi adds can dramatically decrease the code
needed to perform simple tasks while still letting you use the full power of
the API when necessary. RbVmomi extensions are often more efficient than a
naive implementation; for example, the find_vm method on VIM::Datacenter used
in the first example uses the SearchIndex for fast lookups.

A few important points:

All class, method, parameter, and property names match the official documentation.

Properties are exposed as accessor methods.

Data object types can usually be inferred from context, so you may use a hash instead.

Enumeration values are simply strings.

Example code is included in the examples/ directory.

A set of helper methods for Trollop is included to speed up development of
command line apps. See the included examples for usage.

If you don't have trusted SSL certificates installed on the host you're
connecting to, you'll get an OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError "certificate verify
failed". You can work around this by using the :insecure option to
RbVmomi::VIM.connect.

This is a side project of a VMware employee and is entirely unsupported by
VMware.

Built-in extensions are under lib/rbvmomi/vim/. You are encouraged to reopen
VIM classes in your applications and add extensions of your own. If you write
something generally useful please open a pull request so it can be merged back in